Well it seems I am not the only one who suffers nightmare customer service from Vodafone.
Back in June 2004 I had a nightmare trying to order a 3G datacard from Vodafone, so much so that I basically nearly gave up even trying.
Well it seems four years later, customer service at Vodafone still leaves a lot to be desired.
James Whatley of SMSTextNews found his Nokia N95 wasn’t working, so he called Vodafone customer service, his phone was still under guarantee and he had insurance, so it should have been a simpe process, shouldn’t it…
What follows is an account of two hours of my life from the early evening of last night (Thursday).
Vodafone have pissed me off. Their insurance company more so – they are CLEARLY a 3rd party with nothing to do with Vodafone and as such, let them down on an almost spectacular level.
That aside – VF’s CS has seen better days.
If this issue is not resolved by the weekend, I am off to 3.
You heard it here first.
Read the whole story on the full blog entry.
To be honest reading that story doesn’t surprise me one bit, like James, when you are use to good customer service, when you have a bad experience, it really throws you and you can’t understand why they don’t just “get it”.
Hopefully Vodafone may realise that one bad experience for a customer results in lost sales or transfers to another network.
In case you are wondering, who do I use as my mobile phone provider, well it’s T-Mobile.
With hindsight I was very glad that I had a bad experience with trying to claim on my mobile phone insurance.
One evening I put my then Nokia 6230i in my pocket somehow during the course of that evening I managed to crack the screen on the device (still a mystery) however as my “O2 Gold” insurance covered accidental damage I though I’d be okay. In fact I’d paid to replace the screen if necessary. The next day I had to leave home for 6 weeks on a business trip; I needed my phone. So I phoned O2 and was assured that subject to the £25 excess that I could have a replacement phone. However they could not deal with anything but my home address even though I offered my business address (who would forward items to my current location). They told me that it was the insurer’s policy and not theirs. I was mildly unhappy with this statement after all it was their direct debit taking the insurance money, the insurance appeared on the mobile phone bill and the policy was called “O2 Gold” .
End result; I told them to poke it, dropped the insurance, changed my price plan, found a new screen for my phone on ebay for £21 and had it fixed in four days and have neither dealt with O2 or mobile phone insurers since.
Now I’m very happy with my iSync-friendly SonyEricsson W810i on T-Mobile, although it does get kept in a case.